Leonard entered on the scene, and joined the party in the garden. The
countess, perhaps to please her son, was more than civil,--she was
markedly kind to him. She noticed him more attentively than she had
hitherto done; and, with all her prejudices of birth, was struck to find
the son of Mark Fairfield the carpenter so thoroughly the gentleman. He
might not have the exact tone and phrase by which Convention stereotypes
those born and schooled in a certain world; but the aristocrats of
Nature can dispense with such trite minutia? And Leonard had lived,
of late at least, in the best society that exists for the polish of
language and the refinement of manners,--the society in which the most
graceful ideas are clothed in the most graceful forms; the society which
really, though indirectly, gives the law to courts; the society of
the most classic authors, in the various ages in which literature has
flowered forth from civilization. And if there was something in the
exquisite sweetness of Leonard’s voice, look, and manner, which the
countess acknowledged to attain that perfection in high breeding, which,
under the name of “suavity,” steals its way into the heart, so her
interest in him was aroused by a certain subdued melancholy which
is rarely without distinction, and never without charm. He and Helen
exchanged but few words. There was but one occasion in which they could
have spoken apart, and Helen herself contrived to elude it. His face
brightened at Lady Lansmere’s cordial invitation, and he glanced at
Helen as he accepted it; but her eye did not meet his own.
“And now,” said Harley, whistling to Nero, whom his ward was silently
caressing, “I must take Leonard away. Adieu! all of you, till to-morrow
at dinner. Miss Violante, is the doll to have blue eyes or black?”
Violante turned her own black eyes in mute appeal to Lady Lansmere, and
nestled to that lady’s side as if in refuge from unworthy insult.